That Summer Place: Island Time / Old Things / Private Paradise. Сьюзен Виггс
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into her face and through her wet hair, but she didn’t care. She hadn’t had this much fun since she was ten and her dad had brought home a bright yellow Slip ‘n Slide he’d attached to the garden hose in the yard.
“Yahoo! I’ve got it!” She laughed and hooted, then scrambled up and chased the umbrella, until she realized she couldn’t run fast enough to catch it. So she dove toward the wet ground on purpose and just slid after it on her belly.
Right into a large pair of Wellington boots.
A man’s Wellington boots.
For a second she stared at the huge rubber tips, partially sunken in the new mud, then slowly raised her wet head to look up.
The moonlight was behind him and all she could see was a tall silhouette of a man holding the umbrella. He shined a flashlight in her face and held it there.
She squinted and held up her hand to block out the glare.
Without a word he turned the light away from her.
She stared up at him.
His features were blurred, so she swiped the mud and water from her face and slapped her wet hair out of her eyes. Just for good measure she pulled the flashlight out of her jacket and shone it upward, figuring she could either blind him or beat him with it if he meant them any harm.
The light shone on his face. Everything seemed to stop suddenly. The rain. The wind. Her heart. Her breath.
The whole world stopped.
She stared up at him and felt as if she were stepping into her most secret dreams. She whispered, “Michael?”
Seven
It took Michael a minute to realize just who he was looking at. Every emotion imaginable raced through him. Yet he didn’t react; he had spent too much time in Vietnam, where he’d learned to never be surprised, and had developed nerves of steel that served him in his business and his personal life.
Until this very moment.
This was a face he had seen only in his memory for the last thirty years.
She was covered in mud and soaking wet. Her hair was dark and stringy from the rain, her mouth open in stunned surprise.
But that face was still uniquely Catherine.
“Hi, Squirt.”
“Ohmygod…It is you.” She buried her head in her arms the way she had when she was eleven. It was as if she still thought her embarrassing moments would just go away if she didn’t look at him.
“How long have you been standing there?” she said into her arms.
“Long enough to be entertained.”
She took a deep breath. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Who are you?” A young girl stuck her wet and muddy face in front of him. It was almost exactly the same face he had seen hanging upside-down from a tree.
Michael felt as if he were in an episode of “Star Trek,” thrown back to a unique and significant time in his life just to teach him something.
The youngest girl looked exactly like Catherine did at eleven. Another Squirt.
For one brief moment—just a nanosecond of regret that had never hit him before—he was sorry he had never fathered a child.
While he stood there speechless and frozen in time, Catherine rolled over and sat up, resting her hands on her bent knees. She looked at the two girls. “This is Michael Packard, girls. An old friend.”
“There are no houses around here,” the older girl said after scanning the trees. She looked at him as if she expected him to grow horns. “Where’d you come from?”
He didn’t take his eyes off Catherine when he answered her. “The stork dropped me down the chimney.”
Catherine looked right into his eyes, half surprised and half amused. A moment later she began to laugh.
He could see she remembered that all those years ago he’d said those same words to her. A second later the older girl called him a weirdo under her breath, and Michael decided that time didn’t change people very much.
“He was teasing you, Dana,” Catherine said.
He stuck out a hand to help her up. “Here.”
She sat there for a second, her gaze wandering over him. She paused to look at the tool belt hanging on his hips. He wondered what she was thinking when she looked at him like that.
She looked down quickly as if to hide her thoughts, like she was embarrassed. She wiped her muddy hand off on her even muddier pants, then put it into his hand.
He started to pull her to her feet.
“Michael is the handyman on the island,” she told her daughters.
He had the sudden urge to drop her.
“Just like his grandfather was,” she added not looking at him and in a tone that was all too bright and cheery to be real.
Damn it if he didn’t just let go.
She plopped back down in the mud with a splat, and her daughters laughed.
“Sorry,” he said through a slightly tight jaw.
She looked up at him with a stunned expression.
He shrugged. “My hand slipped.” He stuck out his hand again.
“No, thanks. I can get up on my own.” She stood then with her back to him so he couldn’t see her face.
She thought he was a handyman. And from her voice he could tell she was disappointed.
He shouldn’t have let go of her. It was vindictive.
He looked away quickly because he thought he might smile. He took a deep breath, shoved his hands into his pockets, and with a straight face he turned back around.
The older girl was looking at him suspiciously. He waited a moment, then gave her the same speculative look she was giving him.
She stared at him longer than most. He wasn’t certain how to gauge that—as teenaged stubbornness or an innate strength of character he should respect.
She finally looked down and began to fiddle with her hand.
“These are my daughters. Dana and Aly.”
He nodded to them. Daughters meant there was a father. A husband. He glanced at her hand. No ring.
The rain changed meter and began to pound down in sheets. They all looked up for a second, then Catherine touched his shoulder. “Come on to the house!”
She half-ran, half-trudged toward the house with the girls running ahead of her.
At the crooked porch, she pried off her wet tennis shoes by stepping on her heel with one foot, then did the same with the other foot. Her daughters pulled off their shoes and rushed inside, while he sat on an old bench and pulled off his mud boots.
Catherine waited for him, watching him until he stood and she had to look up. She opened the old screen door, which creaked on its hinges the way it used to.
“Come on in,” she said in a rushed voice that was breathy and still too sexy for her own good.
He felt a little numb as he followed her inside and stood there while she took his wet jacket and hung it on a hook. They went into the big old living room where a red and yellow glow from an old lava lamp made the room seem warmer.
No husband on the sofa. No man’s jacket on the hook or boots on the porch. No man.
She walked a few feet into the room and stopped so suddenly it was as if she had hit an invisible wall.
He followed her gaze to the sofa where empty soda cans